Pages tagged Press

Organizations in key states will participate in the Arab American Institute’s Yalla Vote campaign in conjunction with National Voter Registration Day on September 23 to register voters and engage the public on issues important to our community. AAI Executive Director Maya Berry, says American Arabs will push voter awareness Sept. 26

National Voter Registration Day is tomorrow, September 23, and the Arab American Institute (AAI) is making sure our community remains a part of the national conversation. This week, Arab Americans across the country join thousands in hosting voter registration drives for the largest one-day effort of the year to...

On 9/11 on the UA Mall, I encountered one of the ugliest displays of “Islamophobia” I’ve ever seen. Brother Dean, campus’ resident sensationalist, was wearing a fake beard and a shirt with “ISIS” written on it while he held a sign equating Islam with hate and terrorism. He was loudly shouting offensive slogans and confronting a woman in a headscarf, whom I overheard say she felt unsafe, when I first saw him. Her concern was not helped by the fact that the other side of his sign said, “You deserve to be gang-raped.”

On Friday, September 12, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosted an event titled, “Middle East in Turmoil: Can it Recover?”

Karim Sadjadpour, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, moderated the affair, which featured Thomas L. Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and David Ignatius, the bestselling author of Body of Lies and The Increment and journalist who has covered the Middle East and the CIA for over twenty-five years.

The conversation covered a range of topics, including the origins of turmoil,...

The Aspen Institute’s Middle East division hosted an event on Monday which addressed existing political challenges in Gaza.

Dr. Salam Fayyad, Palestinian politician and former Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority and Jeffrey D. Feltman, American diplomat and the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, spoke with Aspen Institute President and CEO, Walter Isaacson in a moderated conversation.

To begin the discussion, Fayyad stated that two elements need to be addressed to ensure that the 51-day war in Gaza (known as Operation Protective...

AAI is proud to sponsor the documentary A World Not Ours (2012) at the fourth annual DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. Directed by Mahdi Fleifel, the film is a compelling and intimate portrayal of three generations in exile in Lebanon’s Ein el-Helweh refugee camp. Fleifel uses his own video recordings, family archives, and historical footage to tell his story.

Ein el-Helweh, which was established in 1948 to house displaced populations, currently holds nearly 70,000 Palestinian refugees. When Fleifel was still a child, his parents uprooted...

By now, anyone who has heard of the “In Defense of Christians” (IDC) summit that took place in Washington, DC last week undoubtedly knows of the infamous incident involving Senator Ted Cruz. Type “In Defense of Christians” into Google, and almost every search result will mention the senator.

It is unfortunate that the only headlines out of the summit were Senator Cruz’s remarks and the audience’s reaction, as well as a few hit-pieces on the religious leaders in attendance. After Cruz got booed off stage, IDC’s Executive Director Andrew Doran exclaimed to the audience: “For the...

From Washington, D.C. to Cairo to Hong Kong to Kiev, posting updates from a city square where tens, hundreds, or even tens of thousands are marching for or against a cause or a government has almost become the driving force for much of the activity on social media. Over the past month, Twitter became the center stage from which the militant group known as the Islamic State declared its territorial gains in Iraq and its executions of two American journalists.

My mother was fond of saying, “If you want someone to hear you, you must first listen to them.” You must know them, understand the questions they are asking and be sensitive to their concerns. If you do this, she would say, “you will be able to speak with people and not at them.”

What happens when you don’t follow this simple rule of communication was on display during the “In Defense of Christians” (IDC) conference—an event put on to highlight the very dire plight of Christians in the Middle East—that was held this week in Washington.

In northern Lebanon, there lays an old village named Aytou that rests on the side of a mountain. Like so many other immigrant populations, a large number of Aytou people came to the United States in the early 1900s in search of opportunities that were not available to them in their homeland. Aytou men and women settled primarily in Mankato and St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo, New York; and, Peoria, Illinois. In a recent edition of InterBusiness Issues magazine, Randy Couri, a Lebanese-American whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from...

While the nation watched President Obama primetime address the threat of ISIS Wednesday night, something else was happening in Washington: Senator Ted Cruz was getting booed off the stage of a

Cruz is often considered a rising darling of the American Christian right. He speaks at evangelical gatherings in the country, talks to groups of conservative pastors and headlines events with the Family Research Council. But Wednesday night, his Christian audience was largely Eastern and Arab. The brand of conservative, American evangelicalism that Cruz often champions—one that often aligns itself with the state of Israel’s interests—did not sit well with...